The Book You Have to Read: “The Hit,” by Jere Hoar

(Editor’s note: This is the 185th installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Peter Handel
The Hit is a hard-boiled novel released in 2003 and written by Jere Hoar, a prominent figure in the Mississippi literary and academic world, whose only other published work was a 1997 short-story collection titled Body Parts.

If you have seen some of the classic films noirs of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, or read much noirish fiction, you know the tropes:

1. Protagonist: Male, maybe a psychologically scarred veteran, or an alienated, bitter loner.
2. Protagonist: Female, femme fatale, black widow, who channels desire and is a sizzling, sexual siren ... but unhappily married.
3. Obsession. Plenty of rumination, plenty of caution ... OK, no caution, just blind lust and big dreams of a better, more-monied life.
4. A plan to make it all happen. A plan to get away.
5. A plan that goes awry.
6. Told in flashback, by the loser, of course.
7. Twists … and the one at the end here is quite predictable.

None of these (cherished) devices are “new” and neither are the narrative machinations of The Hit.

So why bother cracking open this surprisingly obscure exercise in a genre beloved by so many talented writers? The Hit reads much of the time like a paint-by-numbers type of endeavor: Let’s write a hard-boiled novel and have some fun. Yet Hoar’s circle certainly approved of his efforts—Barry Hannah, John Grisham, Jim Harrison, and Tom McGuane have all given The Hit fawning blurbs.

And the thing is, while the story line offered here is familiar, the prose is not. Hoar writes dialogue and scenes like few others in the genre. He was a journalism professor at the University of Mississippi for more than 30 years (1956-1992) and a gifted, if sadly under-published, writer who knew how to craft a hell of a sentence. His irreverent sense of humor also shines through at the least expected moments.

Hoar’s tale is broken up into parts with a (meaningless) conceit of being recounted by our anti-hero, Luke Carr, in the form of “Notebooks” he has written at the behest of his psychiatrist at the mental hospital where he’s being treated.

Carr is a Vietnam veteran who’s returned home to his Southern rural roots. He lives with his well-trained dog, Adel, in a cabin next to a national forest. The book begins with Luke and a woman, Kinnerly Morris, parked in a car off a desolate road.

“Come here. I want to stroke you like a cat,” says Luke
to Kinnerly.

“But you’re a dangerous man,” replies Kinnerly.

“All the nicer for you.”

She came to me on her knees, wrapped her arms around my neck, and bent my head back for a kiss. “How’s that, big boy?” she said in a Mae West voice. My hands slid under her fur coat and wool skirt. All she was wearing under there was a garter belt and stockings.

Fifteen minutes later they leave, only to stop again, in order to discuss the elephant in the room: Kinnerly’s husband, Tom Morris. Once he’s out of the picture they figure life will be perfect!

We sat in the dark. It wasn’t safe. None of this was. I sucked in air. Once this thing started there could be no turning back. It was one long plunge into an icy river with treacherous currents.

Luke has an idea: stage an accident along a roadway that Tom will be driving on in the dark. As a skilled hunter and outdoorsman, Luke concocts an elaborate and seemingly foolproof plan, first setting up an alibi, then killing a doe, and on the night of the murder, propping up that doe’s body with two-by-fours in the middle of the road. When Tom’s car comes barreling along, he’ll have to stop when he hits the deer, and then, Luke will nail him—with his chosen weapon: a crossbow.

The car whistled by, spinning gravel. Brakes howled. Dust flew from locked tires. The car slewed left, flashing its lights across foliage, illuminating details of leaves and limbs. It turned sideways and slid into the deer. The deer bounced away. One supporting timber flew through the light beam. The Porsche’s front wheels churned in a ditch. They reversed and churned again. The motor raced and the back wheels spun. Then the motor quit. I nocked the arrow and waited. It would be an easy shot by the overhead light of the car. The driver’s-side door opened. I heard a voice, a jingly tune. On the car radio, Burt Bacharach was singing “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.”

Out staggers Tom, disoriented and angry. Suddenly, Luke sees him as a person, a man, unarmed, not simply a target. He says to himself, “I was no William Calley, Jr. It was over. I was getting out.”

As he starts to crawl away, though, a twig snaps and Tom sees him and pulls a pistol, aiming at Luke.

Instinctively I released the arrow. He screamed and kept on screaming, leaning to one side. The high-pitched keening went on and on while Bacharach played piano. … Abruptly, Morris sat down and coughed. A soft bubbly waft of air came out of his mouth as he toppled to the side.

Grimly, Luke deals with the dying, grotesque Tom. He gets his body back in the car, and then breaks his neck, just to make sure he’s gone. Except, Tom’s right-hand man, Angus McKay, drives by, and quickly ascertains what’s going on. That’s when the blackmail begins.

All of this in the novel’s first 28 pages!

A new “Notebook” begins, flashing back to how these two wrought-up former lovers, Luke and Kinnerly, reunited. How they share a past, going back to their days as students at Ole Miss, but the Vietnam War and many years divided them. We’re reminded of that classic noir trope, “I know you’re bad for me, but …,”—when Kinnerly turns up at Luke’s cabin after they’ve been apart for eight years.

There’s always one woman in your life that’s wrong for you, who’s going to get you into trouble. You’d be better off never having met her, but she’s the one you think about and want and can’t get out of your mind—not ever.

The stress of what they’re doing, sneaking around behind Tom Morris’ back, causes hiccups in their revived relationship. But the pair stay united, unable to conceive of any other way to be together.

Making love to the woman I’d fantasized about for as long as I’d been a man and having her come to me with the same desire … laughing with her, telling stories … being together for thirty-six hours when she wasn’t hurried or worried, bonded us in ways I didn’t fully realize at the time.

Could I give her up? Sure, I would have said. But cold biological fact is this: When a scientist taps a platinum wire into the pleasure center of a rat’s brain, tickles it with a charge, and shows the rat how to receive that charge upon demand, he will pleasure himself without ceasing until he dies.

And our boy Luke has got that platinum wire buried deeply in his brain. Or what’s left of it. A hot workout in a car pushes it even deeper:

Her buttons came open and her nipples pricked under my fingers. She pushed me away to get space to swing up her legs, saying words I couldn’t make out. I opened the car door behind me to make more room. In my head that warning bell dinged.

I jerked out her silk blouse, uncoupled the tiny front hook of the lacy brassiere, and released her breasts. She cupped the left one, aiming right at me, and slid her free hand around my neck, prickling the little hairs there. Her lips moved on my ear and I tingled to the rub of words and her warm breath. My hands slid under her skirt. Her panties were too tight to get under. The cloth ripped.

It didn’t matter what the cost. It didn’t matter who got hurt. I was gone way too deep inside myself where caution didn’t exist.

The lovers are soon performining a dance of close encounters punctuated by arguments, worry and anxiety, but stick to their scheme. Luke will steal valuable paintings owned by Tom and then sell them to finance the couple’s getaway. But nothing goes smoothly. Luke is contacted by a mysterious man who wants him to undertake a contract killing. He hangs up—as if that would be the end of such trouble. Later, he’s told that he’s not the only guy Kinnerly’s been in the sack with, not by a longshot. She insists she’s been true to him ever since they reunited. Naturally, he’s not sure what to believe.

(Left) Author Jere Hoar.

It begins to dawn on Luke that maybe Kinnerly is setting him up. But he can’t be sure, and Tom’s cohort Angus is blackmailing him and planning to kill him anyway. The local district attorney thinks Morris’ death was no accident. The lovers’ carefully constructed house of crooked cards is wobbling with fear and threats of more violence. When Luke finds his dog badly wounded, he realizes Angus has to go. He gets his crossbow and sneaks up on the man.

My crossbow sight V’d on his belly. The stiff trigger jerked under my forefinger. A bolt whirred across the distance and nailed Angus to the tree behind him. His rifle flew out of his hands, flipped end over end and hit the ground.

Angus looked down. The crossbow bolt stood in his middle. His face reddened as if he were constipated. He said ummm … ummm in an angry buzz.

As Angus begs for help, he tells Luke that he’s “had” Kinnerly as well. But c’mon, get me to a doctor and I’ll leave you alone. Luke replies with another arrow to his throat.

Although Jere Hoar’s narrative follows a familiar noir path, he embellishes The Hit with plenty of local Southern color. Luke’s skill as a tracker and hunter who knows dogs, plays a key part in the story. The violence here is rendered with imagination and verve. And even though Luke is not awfully bright, it’s not hard to root for the poor sap—those devious women are hard to handle! (He does his best.)

Late in this tale, we witness an exciting, vibrantly depicted fight. Luke is attacked by three men and a woman—a set-up—and he can only defend himself with an axe handle retrieved from his car. Even as he’s taking the brunt of a metal pipe from one assailant, “a weight landed on my back, scissors locked around my waist, an arm twisted my head, and nails peeled the skin of my face. The raw tracks across my cheeks and nose burned and stung. I felt body heat, and weight, and hot breath and the tickle of long hair, and smelled lilac perfume. She wears perfume to an ambush? I wondered.

He whups the lot of them, but lands in the ER.

As the two lovers carry on with their getaway plan, we know that somehow it will implode or just collapse … after all, this is noir!

To this reader, The Hit is a regrettably “forgotten” book. Despite its rather perfunctory plot, there is much to admire overall; and with plenty of sex and violence, what’s not to like? Jere Hoar, who died in 2021 at age 91, didn’t turn out much fiction in his lifetime. One is left to wonder what he might have accomplished had he written more.